Farm antibiotics — if we leave it to corporations and government bureaucracies — we'll all become bacteria bait

17 October 2016

A two-fold example of institutionalized stupidity

Remember how concerned we are supposed to be about the rise of antibiotic resistance around the world?

The European Medicines Agency recently released its latest report on antibiotic use in European Union agriculture.

Concealed within the report's (arguably excessive number of pretty but unnecessary) pages was the fact that agricultural use of antibiotics that are "critically important to human medicine" has increased:

New data published on Friday 14 October by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) reveals that many European countries are failing to put an end to massive overuse of antibiotics in farming. Use of antibiotics in Europe remains more than twice as high in animals as in humans.

Overall use of the antibiotics classified as “critically important in human medicine” by the World Health Organization increased to record levels in 2014.

Use of the antibiotic colistin, which is used in human medicine as a last-resort for treating life-threatening infections, also increased in 2014.

The O’Neill Review on antimicrobial resistance, commissioned by the UK government, recommended that high-income countries should aim for a short-term target of 50 mg of antibiotic per kg of livestock. However, the EMA shows that the average European level of use is over three times higher at 152 mg/kg.

In the 25 European countries which provided comparable data, sales of farm antibiotics per unit of livestock went down by just 2% in 2014 compared with 2013. If small annual reductions of just 2% are maintained, it will take 65 years for Europe to reach the O’Neill target.

The most obvious stupidity is that — we have not done anything (at all) about this

There is an indicative other dumbness, as well.

If you look at its report, you will notice that the European Medicines Agency did not highlight its own most concerning finding. Lots of pages and colorful graphs, but no accessibly direct and synopsizing reference to the one problem that requires immediate government action.

Curious omission, don't you think?

The moral? — Bureaucrats and corporatists conspire toward fulfilling the same avarice

Government regularly fails in its most essential of tasks, which is regulating the controllable potential for the occurrence of unacceptably catastrophic public harm:

Cóilín Nunan, of the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, said:

“The shocking overuse of farm antibiotics shown by these data is a result of the continued failure by most countries to ban routine preventative mass medication in intensive farming.

"Spain now uses 100 times more antibiotics per unit of livestock than Norway, 80 times more than Iceland and 35 times more than Sweden.

"The main reason for the difference is that Spain, like most of Europe, allows routine mass medication, whereas the Nordic countries do not.

"The increased use of last-resort and critically important antibiotics is particularly alarming and confirms that reliance on voluntary and softly-softly approaches is not working.”

Exactly — letting everybody do whatever they want on Pure Avarice's behalf is not working.

The laissez faire model of libertarian-inspired governance began failing as a workable model, when the planetary environment peopled up.

The European Medicines Agency must have known what it was trying to bury from view. Unless, of course, everyone at the Agency is an idiot.

I am not picking on the European Union.

The United States Department of Agriculture does the same thing for similar corporation-caballing reasons. And the USDA does not even have the multi-country diplomacy excuse to fall back on.

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Farm antibiotics — if we leave it to corporations and government bureaucracies — we'll all become bacteria bait